A deal struck between Queensland government-owned utility Yurika Energy and QIC Global Real Estate will see a total of 15MW of rooftop solar installed across five major shopping centre sites across the state.
Queensland premier Annastacia Palaszczuk announced the deal on Wednesday in a speech to the Stimulus Summit, an online webinar co-hosted by RenewEconomy and the Smart Energy Council.
In a statement, QIC GRE said the solar rollout would make Queensland’s largest bulky goods shopping centre, Domain Central, fully energy self-sufficient within three years, and reduce grid electricity consumption by up to 30% across the portfolio of retail assets.
“Yurika Energy’s Smart Connected Solar technology, coupled with the substantial physical footprint of our portfolio of Australian retail assets will deliver significant efficiencies and large-scale renewable energy supply,” said QIC GRE managing director Michael O’Brien.
“This renewable-energy-as-a-service approach will provide reliable, clean energy for our centres and our retail partners, significantly lowering the carbon footprint of our Australian retail portfolio and reducing grid electricity consumption by up to ~30% across the portfolio.”
As RenewEconomy editor Giles Parkinson explained here, Yurika is an “arms-length” Queensland government entity, born out of necessity to deal with “ring fencing” issues that limits the ability of state-owned network operators to invest in storage and deal directly with customers.
Yurika also operates the state’s demand management incentive scheme, which at the start of last year had some 135MW of combined capacity and entered the market on at least 60 occasions.
Yurika Executive General Manager Carly Irving said on Wednesday that the commercial and industrial real estate sector was actively investing in ‘behind the meter’ generation technology, energy management and building automation to transform assets towards a more sustainable footprint.
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